


The Curse of Season 5

by PlaidAdder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, jumping the shark, season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-06 03:49:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1843246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I talk about how Season 5 jumps the shark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Curse of Season 5

 

 

 

 

Wondering just how much pain the next four seasons have in store for me, I went scrolling through episode descriptions on IMDB and discovered that there is a season 9 episode titled “Jump the Shark.” I guess at that point everyone involved in  _The X-Files_  had pretty much accepted that the show had become a travesty of its former self. But it is my contention that the shark was truly jumped in Season 5. There was a slight recovery in Season 6, where on average the Monster of the Weeks were better; but two things happen in Season 5 that just kind of hurt to watch. One is the complete collapse of the show’s mythology, and the other is the not unrelated disintegration of the Mulder/Scully relationship. 

I think if I were a TV network executive, which I never will be, I would have a rule that no show lasts longer than 5 seasons. (I understand that many believe that Buffy TVS was an exception to this rule. Didn’t watch it myself, can’t offer an opinion.) I don’t care how good it is, I would say, I don’t care how much money it’s making, five seasons and then let’s move on. After 5 years on any show, I think, everyone’s just kind of done. The stars are antsy and anxious to prove to themselves and everyone else that they can still do other work. The writers, unless they’re REALLY good, are starting to run out of new ideas. More and more the show starts parodying itself and its own exhausted conventions. Everyone can see the writing on the wall; but nobody wants it to end, so they resort to increasingly desperate measures to maintain interest: stunt casting, fanservice, marriages, pregnancies. It’s never pretty, watching a show limp to its death. So rarely is it allowed to die with dignity.

So here’s how Chris Carter—who was probably distracted by the attempt to save his new baby  _Millennium,_ then struggling through its third and final season—decided to keep things interesting in Season 5: he rebooted not only the show’s mytholgy but the Mulder/Scully dynamic. In the two-parter “Redux,” Mulder comes to believe that everything he thinks he’s witnessed regarding aliens and alien abductions was a government hoax orchestrated by the US military to provide a smokescreen for its secret weapons programs. For the rest of the season—most of the time; as we will see, Carter can’t even be consistent about this—we see Mulder repudiate his previous beliefs, embrace Krichgau’s theory about the secret military experiments, and in general go off on anyone who suggests that they believe in the existence of aliens. Scully, meanwhile, deals with so much fallout from her abduction experience that she winds up defending the alien mythology of which she was previously skeptical. So now he’s the skeptic and Scully’s the believer. 

Look, I understand that in season 5 you need to shake things up. But here’s the thing: the role reversal turns the Mulder/ Scully relationship from one of the great brotps in the history of TV to something which is so asymmetrical, and so unfair, that you really start kind of rooting for her to get out of it; and yet at the same time, you can’t, because it’s so important to her still and because seeing Mulder get close to another woman, Diana Fowley for instance, just seems wrong.

Because here’s the thing that drives me insane. When Scully was in the skeptic role, OK, she challenged his theories and she never totally drank the Kool-Aid but she was always, always there for him when his quest for The Truth did something horrible to him. She may not have believed in any of his regressive hypnosis memories; but when he, for instance, nearly destroyed himself with an insane unlicensed form of ‘treatment’ in “Demons,” she saved his ass anyway. She may not have believed that the black oil thing in “Piper Maru” was alien; but she figured out what to do to save Mulder from it and she made the other doctors do it and saved his ass anyway. She may have been just as frustrated as I am about his willingness to believe anyone who told him they knew what happened to Samantha; but she didn’t let him chase down all those false hopes alone. And when the evidence started to suggest that he might have been right about something, she was willing to consider the possibility that her view of the world might not include all the “extreme possibilities.”

So in other words, in season 1-4, Scully’s a skeptic, but she’s not an asshole. She comes to understand how emotionally important his (apparently insane) belief system is and she comes to appreciate that whether or not aliens exist, his attempt to discover the truth about his sister is leading him to some very important revelations. She is capable of respecting his POV without actually sharing it.

In Season 5, Mulder becomes the skeptic. And he IS an asshole about it.

Understand I am blaming the writers and not Mulder himself here. But I cannot help noticing that throughout season 5, when Scully experiences an ‘extreme possibility’ of her own, she gets just about zero support from Mulder. In Christmas Carol/Emily, Mulder does go to great lengths to try to save Emily; but there is also a lot of really weird writing for him in which he seems to be challenging her decision to try to care for her. He is given the opportunity to defend Scully’s right to make her own reproductive choices—I’m not saying I don’t appreciate that—but then the end of the episode shows him pocketing the bottle of purity control that he’s lifted from one of the Calderons, and which could potentially extend Emily’s life, without telling Scully anything about it. On the one hand, he’s respecting her choice—he asks whether she would prolong her life if she could, and Scully says no—but on the other, because he does it without her knowledge or consent, the decision is still his to make and she has no say in it. But “Emily,” which is the episode in which Mulder is at his most loyal and sympathetic, is also the episode in which Mulder inexplicably appears to accept the reality of alien life and the existence of the alien/human hybrid experiments which he’s denying in the rest of Season 5. 

In the next big mythology chunk, “Patient X” and “The Red and the Black,” it gets worse. After watching him be so dismissive of Cassandra—someone Scully identifies with as a fellow abductee—she tells him point blank after recovering in the hospital that she just can’t believe in his new gospel. He becomes convinced that it’s because she doesn’t have any memory of what happened to her after she was summoned to the bridge, so he talks her into getting hypnotized. When she recovers the memories and they don’t confirm his POV, he rejects them. 

This even carries over into the Monster of the Weeks. I particularly wanted to smack him during “All Souls,” where he is completely contemptuous of Scully’s willingness to entertain the possibility that God and Satan may actually be involved in this plot. Now in a way I don’t blame him; “All Souls” is terrible in general. Alll the worst Catholixploitation cliches of _The Exorcist_ brought into play for a story in which the same thing happens four times in a row, served up in the frame of Scully’s ‘confession,’ which suggests that everything about to happen in the story she tells is her fault. But after all the shit she’s humored him over, he can’t at least acknowledge how powerfully all this is affecting her? And when she tells him--and this is a big deal for her, because up to this point she's always been reluctant to admit to him that she gets these messages from her dead relatives--that she had a vision of Emily, he can't come up with a more helpful response than “back away from the case, you’re personalizing it”? Like HE would ever accept emotional involvement and loss of objectivity as a reason to stop pursuing one of HIS cases. 

And then, "The End" not only flings Diana Fowley at us, causing Scully to act jealous and dog-in-the-mangery, but also requires Scully to accept the existence of telepathy and tell Skinner that Gibson is the key to proving everything in the X-Files. So much for her autonomy.

It’s all right there in this image from “The End,” in which Cancer Man torches Mulder’s office and all the X-Files. Scully is horrified by the carnage, and her first thought is oh Jesus, poor Mulder. And Mulder is in fact just standing there in shock. Scully tries to comfort him; but he won’t acknowledge it or react in any way; he doesn’t even put his arms around her. He’s too busy registering his own pain to notice what she’s doing. Or to wonder to himself whether maybe she might need some comforting, since after all this has been her life too for the past five years, and she has actually lost a lot more, on a personal level, pursuing this quest than he has. (OK, Mulder's lost a sibling and a parent; but Scully's lost a sibling and a child, has been abducted, and has had cancer.) 

This is not partnership, this is not mutuality. The role reversal realigns both characters with traditional gender types and imposes a very conventional asymmetrical relationship on them whereby the woman comforts and supports the man but the man must husband all his energy for his heroic quest and so has none to spare for her. Which—I mean—Christ, if i wanted to watch _that_, there’s a MILLION other shows I could go to. You were supposed to be special!

Ah well. At least I can look forward to its getting worse!


End file.
